#flipkart’s digital music store, Flyte – one of the largest online music stores in the country has recently crossed 600,000 downloads, a tad slower than the the initial rate at which songs were being downloaded. Earlier in March it had reported 8,000 downloads daily, at that rate, there should have been about 900,000 song downloads by now.
However, Sameer Nigam who heads the digital business at Flipkart says that the initial surge in downloads has tapered, but is now steadily growing.

“The initial surge in numbers was a natural consequence of a first of its kind service hitting the market. This has now settled into about 5,000 downloads a day and is steadily improving,” said Nigam, Vice President, Digital, Flipkart.

Meanwhile, Flipkart has also crossed gross sales of Rs 100 crores in June and according to Nigam, Flyte currently contributes to about Rs 1 cr which is 1 percent of Flipkart overall sales. Citing company policy, he declined to comment on future revenue projections.

At present, Flyte offers over 2 million unique tracks across 55 languages and 700 genres and subgenres. Talking about the journey so far, Nigam said that Flyte has seen very good response from Indian users. “We are actively working on expanding our catalogue and adding newer features to make the purchase process smoother and easier,” he said. On mobile app front, Flyte had already launched applications for iOS and Android. On the other hand, for Windows 8 and BlackBerry app platforms apps are in the pipeline.

Flyte recently partnered with NH7 to bring Indie music to its repertoire and aims to enable independent artistes to showcase DRM free albums and singles to consumers via NH7. Pointing out its efforts to expand existing catalogue Nigam added “We are also working extensively with record labels to expand the catalogue and has recently added entire catalogue from Magnasound besides labels such as EMI, Warner and Yash Raj Music.”

Flyte is looking at many inventive ideas around the existing platform, including the Flipkart’s wallet that lets music lovers purchase tracks without having to enter card details as well as bundling tracks innovatively to induce discovery and encourage impulse buying.

Sharing key trends across categories, Nigam said “Albums are doing better than singles on Flyte and this is a very exciting early trend. The top three selling genres at Flyte are Bollywood, Pop and Devotional including Hindi, English, Tamil, Sanskrit and Telugu emerged as top download languages.”